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Google has been caught stealing data from its competitor Sohu, a leading chinese portal and search engine, to build its Chinese Input Method Editor (a desktop tool that converts Pinyin characters into Chinese characters to be used for searches on Google). The software released by Google had striking similarities with the IME by Sohu. According to PC world:
The dictionaries used with both software from Google and Sohu shared several common mistakes, where Chinese characters were matched with the wrong Pinyin equivalents. In addition, both dictionaries listed the names of engineers who had developed Sohu’s Sogou Pinyin IME.
Sohu asked Google to stop using the database immediately and indicated that they might take legal action, arguing that they never licensed their dictionary, nor made it public. Google has confronted the issue and has issued an apology on their official Chinese blog, and have released and update of their tool. However they have not hinted about how got hold of the database in the first place.
This exactly why elders teach us to know what we are copying, else we might end up copying the mistakes as well, which might lead us to public humility.
it could be that both just were renting a library of words bought from the same source, that is until I read the Sohu engineers name being in it. Shame on Google.